Foreign Desk

By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT; Thom Shanker in Washington, Kate Zernike and Michael Moss in New York, Dexter Filkins and Ian Fisher in Baghdad and Patrick E. Tyler in Wiesbaden, Germany, contributed reporting for this article.

In theory, the battalion's specialty was guarding enemy prisoners of war, a task that was expected to be a major logistical problem. In fact, an Army report said few of the 1,000 reservists of the 320th had been trained to do that, and fewer still knew how to run a prison.